The Real Reason Your Meetings Are Terrible: An Uncomfortable Truth from the Trenches

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I was sitting in yet another "quick sync" that had already dragged on for 47 minutes when Sharon from accounts started her weekly PowerPoint about quarterly projections we'd already covered three times. That's when it hit me—we're all collectively pretending our meetings aren't absolute disasters, and I'm done with the charade.

After seventeen years of facilitating workshops, consulting for everything from mining companies to boutique marketing firms in Melbourne and Perth, I've seen more meeting carnage than a highway patrol officer. The truth is, 89% of your meetings are terrible not because of the usual suspects everyone blames (too long, no agenda, wrong people), but because you're fundamentally misunderstanding what meetings are actually for.

The Big Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves

Here's what nobody wants to admit: most of your meetings aren't really meetings at all. They're elaborate theatre productions where everyone performs their job rather than actually doing it.

Real talk—I used to be the worst offender. Back in 2019, I was running "stakeholder alignment sessions" that were basically just me showing off how much I knew about change management frameworks. Pure ego massage disguised as collaboration. Took a pretty harsh 360 review to wake me up to what I was actually doing.

The meeting industrial complex has convinced us that gathering people in a room (or Zoom square) automatically equals productivity. It doesn't. It equals the appearance of productivity, which is actually worse than doing nothing because it burns through your team's most valuable resource—their attention—while delivering precisely zero value.

Think about your last five meetings. How many decisions were actually made? Not "we'll circle back on that" or "let's take this offline"—actual, final, implemented decisions. If you're like most teams, the answer is somewhere between zero and one. Maybe.

What Meetings Are Actually For (Spoiler: It's Not Information Transfer)

After facilitating hundreds of these sessions, I've discovered that effective meetings serve exactly three purposes:

Decision-making. Full stop. If you're not making a decision that requires multiple brains and perspectives, you don't need a meeting. You need an email, a phone call, or better yet, you need to just make the bloody decision yourself.

Problem-solving in real-time. When you hit a genuine roadblock that benefits from collaborative thinking. Not "let's brainstorm ideas"—anyone can brainstorm alone with a coffee and a whiteboard. I'm talking about complex problems where different expertise needs to collide in the same moment.

Relationship building. This one's controversial, but hear me out. Sometimes the actual purpose of your meeting is to help team members understand each other better, build trust, or work through interpersonal friction. That's legitimate. Just be honest about it instead of pretending you're there to "align on deliverables."

Everything else—status updates, information sharing, routine check-ins—can and should happen asynchronously. I don't care how much your manager loves their weekly team huddles. They're stealing hours from people who could be doing actual work.

The Australia Tax on Meeting Culture

We've imported the worst meeting habits from American corporate culture and somehow made them even more painful. I've worked with teams in Brisbane who schedule 30-minute "coffee chats" that somehow balloon into 90-minute marathon sessions about nothing. Meanwhile, their European competitors are making decisions and moving on.

There's this uniquely Australian politeness that makes us afraid to call out truly pointless meetings. We'll sit through Sharon's quarterly projections presentation for the fourth time because saying "this isn't useful" feels rude. Newsflash: wasting everyone's time is ruder than speaking up.

I was in Perth last month working with a mining services company where they had seventeen people in a meeting to discuss a decision that ultimately got made by two people in the hallway afterwards. Seventeen! That's roughly $3,400 worth of salaries for an hour of elaborate procrastination.

The Three Meeting Types That Actually Work

The War Room. Maximum 45 minutes. One specific problem. Everyone in the room can directly impact the solution. No laptops, no phones, no Sharon from accounts unless the problem directly involves accounts. You walk out with a decision and clear next steps, or you don't walk out at all.

I've started using effective communication skills training techniques in these sessions, and the difference is remarkable. When people know how to actually listen and respond (not just wait for their turn to talk), you can solve complex problems in record time.

The Pre-Mortem. Before major initiatives, gather your most pessimistic team members and ask them to imagine the project has failed spectacularly. What went wrong? This isn't brainstorming—it's structured paranoia. Some of my best project successes came from pre-mortems that revealed fatal flaws nobody wanted to discuss in regular planning meetings.

The Reset. When team dynamics are genuinely broken, sometimes you need to clear the air. Not a feedback session or performance review—a proper conversation about how you work together. These are messy and uncomfortable, but they're infinitely better than pretending everything's fine while productivity slowly hemorrhages.

Why Your Current Meeting Structure Is Broken

Most teams schedule meetings like they're booking dental appointments—regular, frequent, and dreaded by everyone involved. Weekly team meetings, monthly departmental updates, quarterly all-hands presentations. It's meeting by calendar, not meeting by necessity.

The worst part? We've confused frequency with effectiveness. Teams think more meetings equal better communication, when the opposite is usually true. Every meeting you schedule is a bet that the value created will exceed the combined cost of everyone's time. Most of these bets lose spectacularly.

I worked with a Sydney-based tech startup that calculated they were spending 47% of their working hours in meetings. Forty-seven percent! No wonder their product development was crawling along. They were too busy talking about work to actually do any.

After we implemented some time management training principles and radically cut their meeting schedule, their sprint velocity increased by 60% within two months. Turns out when developers can actually develop, amazing things happen.

The Meeting Hierarchy Nobody Talks About

Here's something I've noticed but rarely hear discussed—meetings have a secret power structure that has nothing to do with org charts. The person who talks first usually sets the tone. The person who talks most usually gets their way. The person who schedules the meeting usually gets to define success.

Understanding this dynamic changes everything. If you want better meetings, you need to deliberately disrupt these patterns. Start with someone different. Ask the quietest person to speak first. Challenge the meeting organiser to defend why you're all there.

I've seen brilliant engineers get steamrolled in meetings by confident but wrong marketing managers simply because they understood meeting dynamics better. Technical competence doesn't translate to meeting effectiveness, and that's a massive problem for Australian businesses where we often promote based on technical skills alone.

The Technology Trap

Video calls have made everything worse, not better. I know this is heretical to say in 2025, but Zoom meetings are productivity cancer disguised as efficiency gains. They've made it easier to schedule pointless meetings because there's no friction—no booking rooms, no walking anywhere, just click a link and boom, you're wasting seven people's time simultaneously.

The mute button has created a false sense of multitasking. People think they're being productive by "attending" meetings while actually doing email or browsing LinkedIn. They're not really present for either activity. It's like trying to drive while texting—you're dangerous at both.

I started insisting on phone-only calls for anything involving fewer than four people. The difference is startling. Conversations that would take 45 minutes on video wrap up in 15 minutes on phone. Something about not seeing faces makes people more direct and less performative.

What Great Meeting Leaders Actually Do

The best meeting facilitators I know are slightly obsessive about preparation, ruthlessly focused during execution, and absolutely paranoid about follow-through. They don't wing it, ever.

They send out agendas that include specific questions each person needs to be ready to answer. Not vague "we'll discuss the project status"—actual questions like "Sarah, what's blocking the API integration, and what do you need from this group to solve it?"

During the meeting, they're comfortable with silence. Silence is where real thinking happens, but most facilitators panic and fill it with chatter. Learn to shut up and let people process. Some of the best insights come after 10-15 seconds of awkward quiet.

They end with clarity, not optimism. Everyone leaves knowing exactly what they're supposed to do, by when, and how success will be measured. "Thanks everyone, great discussion" is not an ending—it's an abdication of responsibility.

Most importantly, they follow up within 24 hours with written confirmation of decisions made and actions assigned. This isn't bureaucracy—it's the difference between a meeting that creates momentum and one that creates confusion.

The Australian Way Forward

We need to get comfortable with admitting when meetings aren't working. Our cultural tendency to "give things a fair go" works against us here. Some meeting formats are fundamentally broken and no amount of good intentions will fix them.

Start saying no to meetings where you can't see your specific contribution. Ask organisers to explain exactly what decision needs your input. If they can't answer clearly, you probably don't need to be there.

When you do run meetings, embrace the discomfort of calling out tangents, redirecting rambling speakers, and ending early when objectives are met. Your team will initially resist this directness, but they'll eventually appreciate getting their time back.

The companies that figure this out first will have an enormous competitive advantage. While their competitors are tied up in endless meetings, they'll be executing, iterating, and winning market share.

Your meetings are terrible because you've accepted terrible as normal. Stop accepting it. The solution isn't better meeting techniques—it's fewer meetings, run by people who understand that everyone's time is finite and precious.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a "quick sync" to cancel.